Nuts and Bolts Filmmaking

Flashpan

Applications

You’ve undoubtedly seen movies that have a moving light pattern on the ceiling to indicate a body of water such as a pool or a house on the beach. This effect is typically generated with a flashpan. There are two primary reasons that a flashpan is used instead of lighting the water itself: the flashpan allows control of where the moving pattern will appear and it also uses far less power than it would take to create the reflections off an actual pool of water. Additionally, it’s possible to do the master shots with a real pool of water present and later use the flashpan to do any close-up or pick-up shots on a sound stage ...